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Saturday, March 03, 2007

Morris Sees McCain's Presidential Bid Collapsing

As Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) launches his bid for the 2008 GOP nomination, political analyst Dick Morris sees his campaign collapsing. "It may not end in an Armageddon style primary defeat, but just dry up from lack of support, money, or interest," Morris writes this week. Morris cites McCain's precipitous drop in the polls soon after former New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani announced his presidential bid.

Although McCain has been considered a front-runner, Morris takes note of how little McCain has been able to raise to date. "In the last quarter of 2006, during a time when he was tied for front-runner status in the GOP and doing well in general election matchups against likely Democratic rivals like Hillary Clinton, he raised only $1.7 million according to his filing with the Federal Elections Commission," Morris said. He had only $500,000 on hand Morris adds.

Morris offers his own ideas on why McCain is falling. He writes:

Fundamentally, he failed to heed the Shakespeare's admonition "to thine own self be true." The John McCain of the 2000 campaign is nowhere in evidence in 2007. Instead of challenging the party establishment, he pathetically waits at its door, hoping to be invited. Where he used to challenge the religious right, he now panders to them. Once he led the battle against big tobacco, for corporate governance reform, in favor of campaign financing changes, and in support of action against global warming. Now he has been identified with two issues, neither popular in the Republican Party: The Iraqi troop surge and amnesty for illegal aliens. Rather than stake out an independent voice apart from the Bush administration, he has become the last survivor at Custer's Last Stand in its support of its policies.

If Morris doesn't like what he sees in McCain, he likes what he sees in Guiliani. "Giuliani, with extensive management experience and a track record of heroism on 9/11, projects a strong image of leadership and a kind of charisma that McCain has trouble matching." Morris thinks Guiliani's campaign may be peaking just at the right time. He also doesn't like what he sees with former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA), who he says has stalled and is falling backwards. He has more on that:

His flip-flop-flip from pro-life to pro-choice and back to pro-life again is not winning him any converts.

Before he ran for senator against Kennedy in Massachusetts, he was pro-life. Then, as he ventured into America's most liberal state as a Republican candidate, he said that his experience with a relative who died after an illegal abortion led him to reconsider his stand on the issue. "I will protect and defend a woman's right to choose" he said as he campaigned for the governorship after losing his Senate bid against Kennedy. But after he had been re-elected as governor and began to focus on a possible presidential race, Romney rediscovered his roots and began to "evolve" on the issue back to a pro-life position, a change which isn't fooling anybody or satisfying either side.

On the issue of homosexuality, Romney promised during their debates to be a better friend of gay rights than Kennedy had been. But now he is campaigning on an anti-gay marriage platform.

Beyond these two legitimate issues, Romney is, unfortunately, paying a steep price for his Mormon faith, something that should not be an issue in this campaign . . . but is.

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

Dick Morris's credibility isn't exactly great, Gary.

He's a political whore, whom I witnessed bullying folks at the 1996 Chicago Democratic Convention, demanding complete and total lock-step Amen choruses with All Things Clinton. Not one comma of variance. Sen. Evan Bayh refused, and his "keynote" was moved to post-primetime in retaliation.

I get Morris's e-mail newsletters. If you added up his predictions, and graded them, he'd fail.

Regarding McCain, if he doesn't succeed, and Rudy does, God help the Republican Party. To turn your back on a bonafide war hero and POW is odd, for a party void of a moral center in the Bush era, and trying to hold onto the White House.

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